Sitting in a quiet carriage of a train to Gatwick Airport, my thoughts turned to the women taking this same route back to Ireland after travelling to the UK for abortions. I wondered if anyone was on this train for that very purpose. More than 170 000 women have travelled abroad from Ireland seeking abortions since 1980.

Having arrived at Gatwick Airport, I met two volunteers working with the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign who were taking the same flight to Dublin as me.

Abortion referendum aftermath: Is Northern Ireland next?
Its laws breach human rights, and its people back change, but politicians remain resistant

Sat, Jun 9, 2018
Fionola Meredith

The decisive vote for repeal in the Republic’s referendum on the Eighth Amendment to its Constitution sent a seismic jolt through Northern Ireland, where abortion remains illegal in almost all cases. It has intensified public conversation about the issue, inspiring pro-choice activists to renew their demands for a change in the law.

Last week, in a protest outside Belfast’s High Court, women from the socialist feminist organisation Rosa NI swallowed abortion pills while being filmed by police. The verdict in the South has also caused uncertainty and dismay in anti-abortion campaigners, who fear that, in the words of the slogan, the North is next.

Belfast woman to challenge NI abortion laws in High Court
Decision follows ruling by British supreme court on legality of situation in North

June 7, 2018
Amanda Ferguson

A Belfast woman who travelled to Britain for an abortion is to take a case to the High Court in her home city after campaigners lost a UK supreme court appeal over the legality of Northern Ireland’s abortion laws.

Supported by Amnesty International, Sarah Ewart, who travelled for an abortion after being told her baby would not survive, said she was seeking a formal declaration that the North’s laws on abortion were incompatible with human rights law.

Northern Ireland abortion law clashes with human rights, judges say
Supreme court dismisses bid to overturn law but adds to pressure on politicians to act

Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent
Thu 7 Jun 2018

Pressure is growing on the government to reform Northern Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws after the supreme court concluded that they are incompatible with human rights legislation.

Justices at the UK’s highest court dismissed a legal challenge by a narrow majority of four to three and said they had no jurisdiction to consider the latest case because there was no actual or potential victim of an unlawful act involved in it.

The hypocrisy surrounding Northern Ireland’s abortion ban shames us all

Barbara Davidson
Friday October 27th 2017

This week the 1967 Abortion Act marked its fiftieth anniversary. While women in England, Scotland and Wales reflect on fifty years of reproductive rights, women in Northern Ireland have no reason for celebration.

Instead, women from Northern Ireland were in the Supreme Court this week, as judges heard a case on whether our abortion laws amount to a breach of human rights law.

Three appeal court judges have refused to legalise abortions in Northern Ireland’s hospitals in cases where women are made pregnant through rape or where pregnancies are doomed due to fatal foetal abnormality.

The ruling in the court of appeal in Belfast also passed on responsibility for any changes to the region’s strict anti-abortion regime to a Stormont assembly that may not exist after Thursday’s devolution deadline.

AN OVERWHELMING majority of people in Northern Ireland believe abortion should be legalised in cases where a woman's life is at risk or when a fatal condition will result in the death of her baby, a major new study has revealed.

Ulster University researchers also discovered huge support for terminations in cases of rape and incest, while many respondents were opposed to women being prosecuted for buying online abortion pills.